Lessons of Taiwan crash

The video embedded below of a car-bicycle collision in Taipei, Taiwan has been making the rounds on the Internet. When you have started the video playing,you can click on “Youtube”, and then on the little gear wheel at the lower right of the image to boost the resolution to 720 lines for the clearest view. Have a look, and then let’s discuss the lessons which this crash might hold.

First, let’s get some things out of the way. Where this video was posted  — by a Taiwanese media outletand in several other places — search on “Taiwan bicycle crash in crosswalk” and you’ll find them — there has been some wonderment that the cyclist on her bike-share bicycle landed on her feet. There have even been comments that the video  is faked. Well, it isn’t: if you look at it frame by frame, all the motion is continuous. There have been many comments about how nobody went to help the cyclist, and particularly about the callousness of the driver who checked his taxi after the bicycle glanced off it, but did not go to the aid of the cyclist. He does not come off well.

There have been recriminations against the driver whose car struck the cyclist — not deserved, as the cyclist was crossing against the light and concealed by stopped traffic. The driver swerved in an attempt to avoid her, probably saving her  from serious injury. The driver also stopped following the crash, but  the car is mostly out of the picture and the video cuts off too soon to show the follow-up.

There have also been many comments about how cyclists should not ride in crosswalks. I agree, if the crosswalks are alongside streets, but  in this case the crosswalk does not connect to sidewalks at a street intersection. Rather, it connects a path in a separate right of way where there are no turning movements by motorists. This crossing was properly signalized, too.

I think that the stopped, congested traffic misled the cyclist into thinking that  she could cross safely against the signal. Note the moving opposite-direction traffic at the far left of the picture: the street is a boulevard with a median. All the opposite-direction traffic should be on the other side of the median…but the roadway on this side of the median oddly has one lane for opposite-direction traffic — oops!

I see failure to obey traffic rules here, and not only by the cyclist: the  driver of the yellow taxi blows through a red light to cross the crosswalk, and the one whose  dashcam recorded the crash starts up on the red light while a pedestrian is starting to cross on a walk signal. The video ends before we see whether e dashcam motorist is going to stop, but it doesn’t look that way.

The cyclist puts a foot to the ground just before the car strikes her. That may have contributed to her remarkably ending up on her feet, but it isn’t a sign of good bike handling.

I expect to be accused of blaming the victim for posting these comments. That misses the point of this post, which is to offer some food for thought about how to avoid crashes. Obeying traffic signals is one of the lessons here, and another is not to ride blindly into a gap where there might be cross traffic.

I certainly hope that the cyclist did not suffer any serious injury, but I do see her as mostly at  fault for the crash. She is the victim, or to put it better, the vulnerable road user, in that she is the only person likely to have been injured in this crash, but she crossed against the light. What’s more to say, except that the opposite-direction lane created a trap which she evidently did not anticipate.